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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  743 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Paul Graham: Heresy

Every night when we sleep, our autonomic nervous system bathes our neurons in acetocholine to wash away frail connections. The process decreases the tendency to misfire by reducing spurious pathways, thereby effectively strengthening the paths that are actually useful in our lives.

Long have we analogized that we "offload" much of our brain function to the Internet - we externalize our memories, we externalize our decision making. In this analogy, social media inhibits our natural forgetting. It is the digital equivalent of insomnia, the equivalent of never being able to rest and reflect.

Social media is what happens when we refuse to allow natural processes to restore our perspective.